This week on inBubbleWrap!

The Right Fight by Saj-Nicole Joni and Damon Beyer, Harper, 234 pages, $26.99, Hardcover, 2010, ISBN 9780061717161 The most common metaphor for alignment within a company, it seems, refers to everyone needing to pull on the same oars. Authors Saj-Nicole Joni and Damon Beyer, in their book, The Right Fight, define this nautically-tinged tenet with a bit more specificity than I just did: "To accomplish anything, the logic goes, employees must agree about the mission, strategy, and goals of an organization." But they argue that while alignment is indeed critical, a successful company requires something much more complicated than harmony. "A well-aligned, smoothly functioning team can do a bad job well, or a job that shouldn't be done at all. The Titanic, by all accounts, was being run smoothly and well when it collided with an iceberg and sank. Because the team of sailors believed the ship was unsinkable, they ignored the initial signs of danger until it was too late." So instead of putting all of a companies' eggs into the alignment basket, Joni & Beyer implore us not to discount the power of tension. Read more about how to make healthy conflict work for you, your team, your company, and sign up to win this week on inBubbleWrap.